"if you think childlike, you'll stay young. If you keep your energy going, and do everything with a little flair, you're gunna stay young. But most people do things without energy, and they atrophy their mind as well as their body. you have to think young, you have to laugh a lot, and you have to have good feelings for everyone in the world, because if you don't, it's going to come inside, your own poison, and it's over" Jerry Lewis
"I don’t believe
in the irreversibility of situations" Deleuze

Note on Citations

The numerical citations refer to page number. The source's text-space (including footnote region) is divided into four equal portions, a, b, c, d. If the citation is found in one such section, then for example it would be cited p.15c. If the cited text lies at a boundary, then it would be for example p.16cd. If it spans from one section to another, it is rendered either for example p.15a.d or p.15a-d. If it goes from a 'd' section and/or arrives at an 'a' section, the letters are omitted: p.15-16.

Previously Bergson discussed how psychologists and philosophers often make this mistake: they incorrectly think that a memory is merely a diminished perception. And for this reason they wrongly imply that there is only a difference in degree between perception and memory. [Consider for comparison Hume’s difference between impressions and ideas as being one of different degrees of vivacity.]

This error is based on a false view of external perceptions. It regards us as spirits that are interested in the abstract information that perceptions give us. We hold that information in the form of memories, which are about objects that are no longer present. So when we have a new perception, the previous one is replaced by a stronger image. New perceptions “throw memories back into the past.” Their precedence in the present results from their superior strength: their “right is might.” (176a) Hence according to the erroneous perspective, memories are weaker forms of perception.

We will now try to characterize memories. To do so, we will need first to determine what the present is for us. Time is something that passes, and its moment of passing is the present.

The essence of time is that it goes by; time already gone by is the past, and we call the present the instant in which it goes by. (176c, emphasis mine)

We can think abstractly about the present. Then we might consider it to be something like an indivisible limit in calculus, lying between the past and the future. However, we do not experience such a durationless moment. But we could in fact consider the present as the contraction between two tendencies: the tendency tending-into the present, and the tendency tending-out of the present. The past has the tendency to project onto the present. And the present has the tendency to wildly break-free into the future. These double tensions felt together at once is our experience of duration. Duration is never experienced as an instantaneity, but it is felt as the ongoing instantaneous contraction of two tendencies pushing-and-pulling the present in two directions at once. [See this entry on Deleuze’s Cinema 2].

But there can be no question here of a mathematical instant. No doubt there is an ideal present – a pure conception, the indivisible limit which separates past from future. But the real, concrete live present – that of which I speak when I speak of my present perception – that present necessarily occupies a duration. Where then is this duration placed? Is it on the hither or on the further side of the mathematical point which I determine ideally when I think of the present instant? [176-177] Quite evidently, it is both on this side and on that; and what I call ‘my present’ has one foot in my past and another in my future. In my past, first, because ‘the moment in which I am speaking is already far from me’; in my future, next, because this moment is impending over the future: it is to the future that I am tending, and could I fix this indivisible present, this infinitesimal element of the curve of time, it is the direction of the future that it would indicate. The psychical state, then, that I call ‘my present,’ must be both a perception of the immediate past and a determination of the immediate future. (177, emphasis mine)

What has just past is a sensation. It determines our reaction. Hence what is just about to come is movement and action. Our present is “an undivided whole.” Thus it is a “joint system of sensations and movements;” it is sensori-motor. (177c.d)